The BCI guide to… exercising your business continuity plan

We all know that we need to exercise our business continuity plans, it’s the only way to find out whether they will work. Of course that’s with the exception of a live incident, but during a disaster is never a good time to find out your plan doesn’t work. But what type of exercises should you run, how often should you run them, how to you plan them and how do you assess them?

These are all important questions and are all vital to ensuring that you have an effective business continuity programme in place, one that will provide reassurance to top management that, in the event of a crisis, the organization will be able to deal with it.

This is why the Business Continuity Institute has published a new guide that will assist those who have responsibility for business continuity to manage their exercise programme. ‘The BCI guide to… exercising your business continuity plan’ explains what the main types of exercises are and in what situation it would be appropriate to use them. It explains how to plan an exercise and what needs to be considered when doing so, from the setting of objectives to conducting a debrief and establishing whether those objectives have been met.

Following feedback from those working in the industry, testing and exercising was chosen as the theme for Business Continuity Awareness Week and the BCI is keen to highlight just how important it is to effective business continuity. A recent study showed that nearly half of respondents to a survey had not tested their plans over the previous year and half of those had no plans to do so over the next twelve months. This guide is intended to make it easier for people to develop an exercise programme and demonstrate that it does not have to be an onerous task to do so.

To download your free copy of the guide, click here. Visit the BCAW website for further guidance and tips on how to develop an exercise programme.

Related / News

Organizations are now less confident in their ability to recover from an incident, according to a new study conducted by Databarracks, which suggests that contributing factors include a lack of testing, budgetary constraints and the growing cyber threat landscape.

What is the value of business continuity? Sure if you have a crisis and the world starts collapsing around you then there could be some benefit – having a plan is place would help you work through the worst of the disruption. But what if you don’t have a crisis, what if your business is ticking along just fine, is there any value to business continuity then? Is there a return on investment?